Scanning the beach:
a sail distends its bubble throat
like a lizard in heat, stray cats
go slow-gait through palms and mimosas
toying with the carcass of a beetle,
sandfleas tick away at my heels
like kamikaze pilots.
In the kitchen
Millicent scales red snapper; the silk fish
we’ll eat on the veranda.
I can account for hydra-headed coral,
atomic weights, salmonella poison,
beetles surviving unchanged for centuries,
lemur feet flat as tiny pancakes,
even life in a pocket of RNA.
But as for how all flesh arose
from that slimy web of muck and weed,
how eyes, brains, nerves sprang
from the interface of plankton and mammal,
all I hear is the thunder of water
on a tin sieve. Crash and caterwaul
as waves crack bone off the coral reef:
an orchestrated bribe, perhaps,
nothing less than lunacy.